Shadow
by StarWings009
Summary: Magic could heal any illness or injury but the wizards hoarded it and killed each other over lineages with it. Magic drove people to such foolishness and insanity as abandoning a child only to hold her up as a messiah. Magic had taken everything from her. Magic was death.


The dream had visited the girl all her short life.

It was always the same: a high, cold laugh; a woman's scream; a flare of acridly green light; pain as her forehead burned.

_"__Keep your nonsense to yourself," _her relatives had sneered when she told them. _"Don't ask questions. Get back to the bacon."_

Then when letters rained from the sky and a giant man bashed in the door and told the girl she was a witch, she wondered.

When the giant man finally gave in and told the girl how her parents had died, why everyone looked at a tiny, scrawny, eleven-year-old with awe and worship, she knew.

Magic.

The screaming woman was her mother, and the green light was magic.

Staring at the giant through the veil of her dark, messy hair, the girl demanded to know why they venerated her. The giant had no answer for her.

When the wandmaker with the deft fingers and the eyes that saw too much handed her a wand and told her that it was brother to the one that had slain her parents, she nearly screamed. Instead she simply nodded and pocketed it.

And so the girl returned to her relatives' home with a trunk full of magic that she did not want, carrying a burden she never should have had to, and with rage in her heart.

Her relatives ignored her and she ignored them. And the girl finally understood why her relatives hated magic.

Magic drove people to such insanity as abandoning a child for a decade and then holding her up as a messiah. Magic could heal every single known illness or injury quickly and with almost no side effects, yet the wizards hoarded it and used it to kill each other over lineages.

Magic stole her family and childhood from her. Magic was death.

Later that night the spellbooks and robes burned in the living room fireplace, the cauldron was used to hold a new pot plant, the complex glassware and scales shattered and binned, and the wand reduced to kindling under her feet. And the girl laughed, and her relatives laughed too.

After that the girl and her relatives got along much better. She would never love them, never forgive them for the abuse they had heaped on her, but she would tolerate their presence. They would never love her either, a reminder of a world they hated and feared, but would tolerate her presence and treat her as merely an unsociable houseguest rather than a slave.

On September 1st when the train left for the castle and she did not board it, a tall woman in green robes and a pointy hat showed up. The woman begged, pleaded, and threatened, but the girl would not change her mind, and the woman left alone.

Next to show up was an old man, with a waist-length beard and clothing with more colors than a paint shop. He too begged, pleaded, and threatened, and eventually abandoned all subtlety and hammered on the girl's mind with his magic, but still she refused him, and he left, saying that he would know if she ran and that it would go much better for her to deal with him instead of the Ministry.

The old man returned again and again, but still she refused him. At last he threatened that the Ministry would remove her magic and her memories of it if she did not attend his school. She laughed and told him they were welcome to it. He left whiter than her relatives' new marble countertop.

That night the girl realized that even with the wand smashed and the books burned, she could still feel her magic crawling beneath her skin, like a burning sea of lightning. She didn't want it.

She didn't want this thing that turned people into fools and had taken her parents' lives.

She didn't want it.

She _hated _it.

She barely even noticed it swirling, becoming icy and dark and cold, until her skin seared and a scream tore from her throat and shadow seeped from her body to form an amorphous black mass in front of her. A questioning thought came from it, and she somehow knew it would obey.

The girl wanted to leave the house that had been her prison, to be hidden and safe from the wizards and her relatives.

And so the black mass, obeying only her deepest desire for freedom, made it so.

When the old man arrived, frantic and terrified for his carefully-crafted plans, he found only the girl's relatives being taken away by police, the neighbors watching in horror. It appeared someone had heard the girl's scream and called the police, who had entered the house and found no sign of the girl and her relatives celebrating that she was gone.

They were eventually released as no evidence could be found to convict them—thanks to the manipulations of a certain old man—but the people of Surrey knew that the Dursleys had somehow…disposed of…their poor niece, and gotten clean away.

And so the girl passed into local legend, a cautionary tale for careless children. _"Steer clear of the Dursleys," _parents would say. _"Steer clear of that family, or you might end up like poor little Alyssa Potter. Steer clear of the Dursleys, or they might never find your body."_

The girl was never seen again, but ten years later, a dark-haired young woman with emerald-green eyes sat and watched the sun set over a sapphire-blue sea, a shadow at her side, and finally smiled.


End file.
